Cryptocurrency’s frictionless, transnational, low-regulation transactions have long promised the ability to pay anyone in the world for anything. More than ever before, that anything includes human beings: victims of human trafficking forced into scam compounds and the sex trade on an industrial scale, bought and sold in crypto deals carried out with impunity, often in full public view.

In new research published today, crypto-tracing firm Chainalysis found that crypto-funded transactions for human trafficking—largely forced laborers trapped in compounds across Southeast Asia and coerced into working as online scammers, as well as sex-trafficking prostitution rings—grew explosively in 2025. According to the firm’s analysis, based largely on tracing across blockchains the cryptocurrency those criminal operations use, researchers found that crypto transactions for human trafficking grew at least 85 percent year over year. The total amount of those transactions, Chainalysis says, is now at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually—though it declined to give an exact number for that sales total because it considered its measurements to be a conservative estimate that likely undercounts the true scale of the issue.

“This is the continuation of a story of industrialized exploitation,” says Chainalysis analyst Tom McLouth. “The emergence of borderless, low-fee payments has created the opportunity for human trafficking to scale faster.”

The human trafficking operations Chainalysis identified in its research were primarily Chinese-speaking criminal groups posting advertisements for their offerings to the messaging service Telegram. Many of the posts were found on “guarantee” black markets that run on Telegram channels, such as Xinbi Guarantee and the recently defunct Tudou Guarantee, which offer escrow services that accept and hold cryptocurrencies to prevent users from being defrauded. Chainalysis says it also identified other independent Telegram channels selling prostitution services.

By identifying trafficking operations from those Telegram posts as well as information from law enforcement and other partner groups, the company’s analysts were able to trace the operations’ transactions, which are almost entirely carried out with “stablecoins,” cryptocurrencies that are pegged to the US dollar to avoid volatility, such as Tether and USDC. Much of the profits from the human trafficking operations also flowed back into the same Telegram-based guarantee markets, which serve as vast, multibillion-dollar money laundering hubs, with vendors willing to offer cash in exchange for dirty crypto.

The scam compounds across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos that exploit forced laborers, most often lured from South Asia and Africa with fraudulent job offers, have been a booming business for years. They now pull in tens of billions of dollars in revenue annually, more than any other form of cybercrime, and human rights groups have estimated that they’ve trapped hundreds of thousands of conscripted scammers. Chainalysis says, however, that the majority of the measurable growth it traced in crypto-funded human trafficking actually came from sex trafficking operations. It found detailed Chinese-language Telegram advertisements describing profiles of sex workers available by the hour, for more long-term arrangements, and even international services offering to fly sex workers to locations like Macao, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or other “overseas” destinations.

Some advertisements made references to suspected sex trafficking of minors, such as “Lolitas” and “real high schoolers,” Chainalysis found. The company’s analysis of the operations’ crypto transactions also make clear that their payments flow to entities that oversee large numbers of women and girls, not independent sex workers. Chainalysis found that 62 percent of transactions for the typical prostitution networks it examined were between $1,000 and $10,000, while for the international sex trafficking operations in particular, it found that nearly half of transactions topped $10,000, suggesting “organized criminal enterprises operating at scale,” as the company describes it.